Older Changes ("Super" Gravity) 2001-2004

After MicroPlanet closed and released Gravity as freeware, Albert Choy, from MicroPlanet, released unofficial versions known unofficially as "Super Gravity" before the open source version. These changes were never incorporated in the application help or changes.txt. They are documented on this page. User Functions are highlighted.

WARNING: Database format change! Builds 2052 and up share a common database format that is not compatible with earlier versions! You should save a backup if you want to return to earlier versions.
Q: Where did my draft messages go? A: Newer versions have a separate draft folder. Go to " View - Draft Messages "
*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
** Build 2060 (January 20, 2004)(also see Builds 2058 and 2059)
[-] FIXED - Some longs URLs caused the "Repair URL" function to crash the application
[+] NEW - "Back to Draft" command sends an article from the Outbox back to the draft folder for re-editing. It is intended to replace the "Back to Editing" button that was in earlier versions
[B]  Bug - gravity will croak on some articles found in Opera news groups (I think if one of the headers contains Quoted Printable ISO-8859-13 e.g. =?ISO-8859-13?Q?xxxxx=E4xx?= ) This affects all builds back to build 2052 (when the database change occurred). Also affects the open source version 2061
*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2059 (January 15, 2004)
[+] NEW - "Decode to" command overrides the decode directories Command: "Article - Decode to.."
[+] NEW - Check box to turn on/off X-Faces     Command: View - Global Options - Display - Show X-Faces
[-] FIXED - Created date in draft message window

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 (Build 2058) (January 11, 2004)
[-] FIXED - URL highlighting works as it did before. Copying an URL with the mouse does not cause the link to open the browser
[+] NEW - "Repair URL" command (right click in article pane) allows you to send a wrapped URL to the browser.     Useage: Highlight the entire URL - right click - select "Repair URL"
[+] NEW - X-Face support

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2057 (September 8, 2003)
Additions
[+] Changed - Gravity now accepts y n m g from the List Command . There was a problem with Hamster and gatewayed groups (Gravity did not accept g)
[+] New - Gravity sends User-Agent header instead of X-Newsreader, with the version/build number
[+] New - added commas to the line count
[-] RFC 2047 Tweaks

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2056 (May 12, 2003)
Additions
[+] New - setting to link a signature to a group (Newsgroup - Properties - Signature)
[+] New - settings to send Raw 8 bit , ("From" and "Subject" headers)
[+] Adds "source" view to show raw article (Article - Show Source) Fixes
[-] Fixed the spelling and "Gravity Lite" Bug in 2051
[-] Fixed the Bozo Bin crash bug
[-] Fixed several RFC 2047 encoding bugs

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2051 (April 30, 2003)
Additions
[+] Uses RFC 2047 encodings on the "Subject" and "From" lines.
[+] Adds autosave decode jobs (Image Factory)
[+] Adds option to send 8-bit chars (7 bit was a problem in fr.* groups) (Global Options Encoding) NOTE: This build will always encode 8 bit characters in "Subject" and "From," so will also cause problems in fr.* groups if 8 bit characters are posted.
Fixes
[-] Changed some char set tables
[-] Fixed bug in the re-edit drafts
[-] Removed the code to check the MP website for updates, so Gravity no longer needs WinInet.dll

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2046 (March 22, 2003)
Additions
[+] New - News URLs and message IDs are sent to Google . See Build 2043 for more information. However, unless you are doing a "clean" install with the new installer, you will need to make a small registry change for proper URL recognition.
[+] New - Complete install package for ver 2.6 available. You can also extract files with any PKZip-compatible program. New users should not need to install version 2.3 or version 2.5 first. The stand alone Gravity binary will continue to be available to save bandwidth. However, if you are only replacing the executable, you should apply the registry fix shown in build 2043.
[+] New - Export Outbox messages to text files.
[+] Added more error handling to reduce database corruption. Gravity attempts to catch errors and the program tries to find the last valid article-body and truncate the file properly. This should make it useable again.
[+] When thread sorting by score, for 0 scored articles - secondary sort is date, tertiary is subject .
[+] Modernized sorting code. The user will not notice but the code has been redone a bit to use STL stuff instead of MFC stuff.
[+] New - Draft messages are saved in their own folder . You can view them with the menu "View - Draft Messages" (actually changed in Build 2043)
Fixes
Manual Decode is fixed.
Increased the height of the middle list box in the Image Factory.
Fixed bug in the logic for the quick filter dialog. When selecting both From and Subject, the logic acted as an AND condition. Now it should be OR.
Fixed old bug - hang when closing Gravity during decode.
Filters - Corrected Sort Order when Threading by Score, Ascending/Descending. This applied to filters. When thread sorting by score - ascending and descending were reversed. Fixed now.
Bugs
Draft messages cannot be called for editing more than once (fixed in Build 2049) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit causes problems in fr.* groups where they like to send an 8bit header.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2043 (March 9, 2003) This version was never announced publicly, because it was superceded by 2046 so quickly.
Additions
[+] Sends MIME-Version: 1.0, Content-Type, and Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit headers. Content-Type is set in Global Options Encoding. Note: The 7bit setting causes some problems in the fr.* groups.
[+] News URL and Message ID Handling Gravity will attempt to open a web browser and pass the URL/ID to Google according to the following scenarios.
Case 1 - News URLs of the following form are sent to Google with one click.
 news:<3e3d423b$1$nhreonpu$mr2ice@news.mindspring.com>  news:3e451dd5.1124633@news.mindspring.com...
Case 2 - URLs and e-mail addresses of the following form are handled by displaying a dialog box that presents a choice of Googling or emailing or doing nothing.
 DGa9a.753$wg2.332229848@newssvr12.news.prodigy.com

URL recognition depends somewhat on the URL/text wrapping. Sometimes you can pass the whole URL if you temporarily increase the pane width so that the URL does not wrap. Also, if more than one URL or ID are showing (such as when viewing all headers), Gravity will not pass the URL. You can sometimes fix this by DECREASING the pane width temporarily so that only one URL is on the line.
NOTE: you should apply the registry fix shown below or some URLs may not be sent properly. You should NOT need to apply this fix if you did a clean install with the new installer.
Registry Hack required for proper URL recognition   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MicroPlanet\Gravity\URL\Settings
Change "NewsPattern" to
(((news:)){1,1}([a-zA-Z0-9._$%\<-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9._$\>-]+))
Change MailToPattern to something like this:
(((mailto:)){0,1}([a-zA-Z0-9._%$-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9._$-]+))  
Basically, the dash/minus sign "-" should come LAST in a bracketed list []. This was an error in earlier versions. If you notice some URLS are not passed correctly you may need to add a character. Be sure to add the characters to the left of the dash/minus sign.
If you copy and paste from your browser be sure you are not including extra spaces.
The older default NewsPattern setting is provided below for reference.
(((news:)){1,1}([a-zA-Z0-9._$-\<]+@[a-zA-Z0-9._$-\>]+))

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2039 (April 25, 2002) Fixes
Build 2039 adds fixes for decoding multi part yEnc articles posted with Hogwasher. Certain articles would cause a Bad Article Error.
Also there is a fix for the conditions that caused Super Gravity to crash when using a Complete_Binaries filter in a group where an article subject contains 0/0 or 0/00. Other filters were not affected.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2037 (March 24, 2002)
Fixes
Gravity can now handle Base 64 encoded headers for ISO-8859-1 (previously only QP decoded correctly).
Additions
[+] There is a minor addition to the "about" screen. (Menu item help - about)     The screen shows the current ANSI code page. It is there as a support aid.
Bug
Bug - (Fixed in build 2039) Super Gravity will crash with an exception if the article subject contains a 0/00 or 0/0 and a Complete_Binaries filter is used (there is no problem with other filters). This bug also affected earlier versions. Thanks to everyone who helped find this. Until it is  fixed you can delete those articles with a rule (or display a warning). A suggested regular expression is: 0/0+[^1-9]

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2036 (February 2002)
Additions
[+] SMTP Authentication . Gravity can send a username and password to the SMTP server. No big encryption schemes are supported, just  "AUTH LOGIN" and "AUTH PLAIN."
[+] The "server - properties" tabs are altered to allow the SMTP configuration.
[+] There is some additional code to display ISO-8859-1 accented characters in the article bodies.
Fixes
Gravity now decodes certain multi part binary posts from Hogwasher that previously failed. Al relaxed Gravity's decoding behavior to deal with them.
Bugs
No new bugs (see build 2035). The SMTP authentication has not been tested extensively yet. It was tested on the rogers@home servers successfully.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2035 (February 2002)
Additions
[+] Adds the following character set support for Quoted-Printable "From" and "Subject" lines.
ISO-8859-1 (Windows Code Page 1252) (Latin 1 - ANSI) ISO-8859-2 (Windows Code Page 1250) (Latin 2 - Central Europe) (does not display properly)
Fixes
Fixed an infrequent little bug where Image Factory would report an incomplete yEnc attachment, even if it was ok.
Bug
ISO-8859-2 does not display correctly.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2034 (Jan 2002)
Additions
[+] Adds yEnc decoding . Super Gravity can now decode yEnc encoded binaries. You can not however, encode and post using yEnc.
Bug
Buglet - There is a little bug where Image Factory will warn that some single-part yEnc binaries may be incomplete. The decoded attachments are ok. Only the warning is wrong. (fixed in build 2035)

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2032 (Sept 2001) Fixes/Additions
Gravity no longer croaks when you feed an invalid regular expression into the new QuickFilter dialogue.
[+] You will get a friendly warning when using a 'lines' rule condition . This is because, with multi-part binaries, the rule condition sees the individual article line count, not the total line count. Al didn't want anyone to get confused about that. In other words, don't try to make a rule that deletes articles less than 10,000 lines.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Version 2.6 Build 2031 (forgot date)
Additions
[+] Adds a Quick Filter floating dialogue box [ screen shot ]. Accessed by keyboard commands " / " or " CONTROL Q ." Use "F5" to refresh the display. Note that canceling retains the search string. Killing the dialogue clears the string. See the invalid regular expression bug below.
[+] Article commands apply to all articles in the complete binary, instead of the first article.
[+] The ability to copy a filter .
[+] Speed meter in status bar . Measures the throughput every 5 seconds; display reports the average speed over the last 60 seconds.
Bugs
If you enter an invalid regular expression in the new QuickFilter dialogue, Gravity will croak with an exception. (fixed in build 2032)

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
First Unofficial Release (August 2001, v 2.5 no new build number)
Additions
[+] Shows complete multi-part binaries with user-defined filters.
Bugs
Manual Decode does not work.
Article commands apply to one article in the complete set (not exactly a bug but changed in later versions).